


the cosmos own our luck

by allthingsholy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Flash Forward, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pining, Post-2A Finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:10:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3462185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsholy/pseuds/allthingsholy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The team is still reeling from the events in the underground city when they discover an 0-8-4 that shows them things they can't explain. Coulson, May, and Skye see a mission with life and death consequences, while Fitz and Simmons see something of a far more personal nature. (Set after 2A; is alt-canon for 2B.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the cosmos own our luck

**Author's Note:**

> A million and a half hugs to damalur for holding my hand literally this whole time; anything that passes for quality is very probably her fault. Many thanks to betternovembers for giving this a once-over and letting me brazenly steal the premise from her old fic. Thanks to mrsvc for curbing any medical inaccuracies; any errors that made it in are my own. The science parts come from wiki searches and my own imagination.

say under right and rare conditions  
space and time could oscillate.  
i know what those conditions  
would be for me.  
i’d like to keep my distance,  
my others, keep my rights reserved.  
yet look at you, intreasured,  
where resolutions end.

no matter how we breathe  
or count our breaths,  
there is no caring less  
for you for me.  
\- alice fulton, fix

++++

The earth cracks and crumbles and opens beneath them like a maw. Jemma’s feet are clumsy beneath her as she tilts toward the growing chasm in the center of the room. For the second time in the past twenty-four hours, she can feel the pit of her stomach wanting to give out, black emptiness reaching up for her and when she closes her eyes, she sees nothing at all.

The hands that tighten around her shoulders jerk her back to herself. She opens her eyes to falling dust and blooming earth, Fitz’s face inches from hers and panic in the lines of his jaw. The ground groans beneath them. Her fingers close around the closest parts of him, his elbow, his hip, and their hands on each other are the only steady thing in the world.

++

No matter how many times Skye comes in to have her blood drawn, she complains: about how cold Jemma’s hands are, how long it takes her to prep the needle, the wattage of the overhead lights in the lab. Jemma makes an exaggerated effort to rub her hands together to warm them and grabs a hypodermic needle and a tube. 

“If you’d sit still, it wouldn’t take as long,” Jemma says, her voice stretching just past normal. She presses her fingers against the inside of Skye’s elbow, her thumb sliding up against the elusive ridge of a vein. Every time Jemma does this—twice a day for the past month—Skye watches Jemma lift the needle, watches her aim for the vein and push in, watches the spurt of red against the sides of the tube. The expression on Skye’s face is unreadable, every time. 

Jemma’s never liked the smell of the lab at the Playground. It’s formaldehyde and sulfur and something else, something she’s always found malignant and wrong. The smell of secrets, maybe. The smell of lies. There are a hundred questions Jemma isn’t able to answer yet, but she puts on her best bedside manner anyway and smiles at Skye. 

“So you and May have a training session this afternoon?” Jemma labels the tube, snaps off her gloves and makes a note on her tablet. 

Skye kicks one foot against the ground, skims her toes across the tile. The bruises on her cheekbones are long since faded, but there’s still a shadow at her hairline, the faintest hint of blue and green streaking up her temple. “An hour of yoga every day at four,” she says. 

Jemma’s smile is a little too tight. “That’s good. Good to maintain a routine.” She sees Skye check the tube of her blood in the rack, the label still wet-inked and new. Skye’s eyes narrow: the label says _hazardous_ in bright red letters. Jemma wants to tell her that it’s protocol, standard lab practice, but she knows that’s not the point. The thing inside Skye might be silent now, but it’s there all the same, and it’s waiting.

That’s what makes Skye’s check-ins so unbearable: the half-truths and lies by omission. Jemma isn’t allowed to throw up her hands in defeat, push away her research notes and give up. She isn’t allowed to say she doesn’t know. She isn’t allowed to say that nothing’s fine. The thing that was waiting for them out there has found its way inside, and Jemma’s already had more blood on her hands than she bargained for. 

The steady beep of Skye’s oxygen monitor is the loudest thing in the room. Skye’s eyes are full of a thousand things—questions and resentment and anger and fear—and Jemma doesn’t have an answer for any of it. Her hands go still against her tablet. _They didn’t train me for this_ , she doesn’t say.

Jemma lays a careful hand down next to Skye’s, almost—not quite—touching her. “Do you want to do something tonight? After your training? I have some things I need to finish up here, but after that we could—”

Mack’s footsteps are louder than the comfort Jemma’s trying to give and both girls turn their heads at the same time. Mack’s large frame folds in on itself every time he steps into the lab, and he seems half his usual size when he stops in front of them, his hands twisted into fists at his sides.

Skye’s not the only one logging twice daily check-ins with Jemma and her newest lab equipment. There’s a steady rotation of people she’s responsible for now, all of them wanting answers and none of them happy to see her. Mack’s on nearly the same schedule as Skye, his blood samples filling up the rack next to hers; Bakshi’s only just been weaned off the respirator, still cuffed to a bed down the hall; and Raina— 

Jemma doesn’t know how to explain what her visits with Raina are like, so she doesn’t try. The reports she gives Coulson cover all the relevant details: blood scans and trace analysis, preliminary findings and the thinnest of biological theories. Jemma doesn’t mention the feeling that tightens her chest every time she climbs the stairs, the high crackle of energy threaded through the air down there. The bars might be invisible, but vault D was a cage long before they put Raina inside.

To say it’s not the kind of research Jemma thought she’d be doing when she came on board is an understatement. Mack’s resistance to Jemma’s tests hasn’t been quite as vocal as Skye’s but she wouldn’t call him the poster boy of her testing program either. Jemma lets out a breath and turns back to Skye, but she’s already pulled away, shrugging on the thin jacket she came in with. 

“I have to meet May,” Skye says. She nods at Mack, a quick dip of her chin, a firm set of her jaw. She looks at Jemma out of the corner of her eye. “I’ll find you after, maybe.”

The last few weeks have been littered with maybes. Jemma bites back her usual speech—go easy on the training; come back to the lab if you experience any dizziness; on the off-chance you starts to turn blue, pull the fire alarm. Skye’s heard it before. She wouldn’t listen anyway.

Jemma and Mack both watch Skye leave the lab, watch her through the windows until it’s just the two of them. Twice a day they go through this, twice a day Mack rolls over a lab chair so Jemma can take his vitals and find a vein.

Jemma starts with the usual questions, looking for signs of fatigue or nausea, emotional or physical aftereffects. She takes his temperature, checks his weight, clips the oxygen monitor onto his finger. 

Jemma fastens the BP cuff around his arm. “Have you noticed any difference in your reaction to stress?”

“Since the last time you asked me?” Mack’s voice isn’t cold, just weary. “No.” The air hisses out of his cuff and Mack drums his fingers against his knee.

Jemma’s unfastening the cuff when she notices the streaks of motor oil on the front of her lab coat. Mack makes an apologetic gesture, holds up his perpetually stained hands. “Sorry. Collateral damage. Can’t tell you how many shirts I’ve lost to new tech.” 

She bunches the cuff up and sets it on her bench. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s seen much worse.” 

Mack picks at his fingernails. “I’m sure.” 

This is the problem with Mack’s visits. Not that they’re unfriendly, not that he’s harsh or mean with her, not that she’s angry at him. They just don’t _work_. Mack is Fitz’s in a way that no one else here is, in a way that means he’s definitely _not Jemma’s_. The spaces in their conversations could hold eternities.

Jemma records his vitals on her tablet and grabs a new pair of gloves and a needle. She runs a finger up the inside of Mack’s forearm, traces the promising outline of a vein against the muscles corded up and down his arm.

Mack never watches the needle go in the way Skye does. He keeps his eyes fastened to the ceiling while the tube fills with blood, and it had taken Jemma very little time to discern it was because he doesn’t like it—his own blood or other people’s. It feels like something she should’ve known about him before, but. In the back of her mind, she’s thinking about the last time he used those muscles against _her_ , thinking about exactly what the strength of him could do. Mack’s back goes rigid. Maybe he’s thinking about that too.

While Jemma is labeling the test tube, Mack rolls the lab chair back to the bench and pauses. “Did Fitz talk to you about the splinter bomb extraction?”

Jemma slides the tube into the rack between Skye’s and Raina’s samples. It only takes her an extra half a second to put on a normal face before she turns to Mack. “No, I haven’t seen him lately. Is it going well?”

He and Fitz have been working on extracting whatever properties of the obelisk they can find in the splinter bombs they recovered from Hydra so Jemma can look for similar trace elements in the tests she’s running on Raina’s, Skye’s, and Mack’s blood. Fitz has given her a few rushed reports in the hallways or the kitchen when they run into each other; he hasn’t been back in the lab.

Mack sighs and works his hands into his back pockets. “Fitz thinks we have enough to start testing,” he says. “I thought he would’ve told you.”

Whatever feeling blooms up in Jemma’s chest, she’s careful not to label it disappointment. She pulls off her gloves and throws them in the bin with exactly as much—and no more—force than is necessary. “Three grams should be enough to start with. Have you guys done—”

“Elemental breakdowns, yeah, Fitz has been tinkering.” 

Jemma nods. “Thank you for letting me know. I’ll come by later and see if the sample’s ready.” 

Mack shrugs a shoulder and opens and closes his mouth. He almost takes a step forward, but thinks better of it. “It’ll take some time,” he says finally.

Jemma straights the rack needlessly. “The tests?”

“And the other thing.” Mack’s smile is terrible and kind.

They don’t hear May’s footsteps until she’s halfway into the lab, mouth set in the usual hard line. “Briefing room in five,” she says. “Coulson’s got something for us.”

++

An hour later, Jemma’s buckled into one of the seats on the Bus with Skye on one side, Fitz on the other, and May on comms telling them to stay where they are until the plane reaches cruising altitude. Jemma drums her nails against her tablet and runs her teeth along the inside of her cheek. 

“New Zealand,” Coulson had told them when they congregated around the holocom, “our Sydney team thinks they found an 0-8-4.” 

Jemma had felt more than seen the sudden tension in Skye. Coulson hadn’t paused. “A team of us will head out to see if we can recover it, the rest of you will stay here and monitor the situation in Beirut. Fitz, Simmons, Skye, you’re with me. May will drive the Bus. Any questions?”

As far as assignments go, it’s pretty straightforward, but it’s not the idea of going back into the field that gives Jemma pause. It’s the five of them, the first five of them, back on the Bus all together. It hasn’t been just the five of them in—Jemma can’t remember the last time it was just the five of them. She tugs at the end of her seatbelt and clears her throat. “How long did May say the flight would be?”

“Fourteen hours,” Skye says, not looking up from her tablet. Jemma can see blueprints, Skye’s finger tracing the lines of a structure on the screen. “It’ll be 7 a.m. local when we land. We should sleep.”

Skye unfastens her belt and heads toward Coulson’s old office. Fitz shifts in his seat, says, “We’re not at cruising altitude yet, May said—”

The look Skye gives him is enough to stop whatever warning Fitz might’ve offered. Skye climbs the stairs to the office, leaving Jemma and Fitz with only the sounds of the engines outside. 

Jemma unlocks her tablet and pulls up an article on comparative DNA regeneration. Beside her, Fitz knocks a nervous rhythm against the table with his fingers. It’s minutes before they speak. Jemma’s reading about mutagenic agents when Fitz says, almost too softly for Jemma to hear, “You think she’s okay?” 

They haven’t talked much about what happened in Puerto Rico. There had been debriefing after debriefing with Coulson and May: what had they seen in the tunnels, what data had they been able to recover, and. And Trip. It’s been over a month and Jemma still feels the back of her throat tighten up, the hard knot of grief at her sternum. She looks up at Fitz, her lips an unsteady smile, and shrugs. “Trying to get her back to a normal routine, I guess. With everything that’s happened, Coulson’s trying to keep everything the same. I figure that’s why the five of us are here, to make it feel like it was before.”

Fitz huffs out a laugh, a bitter breath between his teeth. “Yeah, just like before.”

Jemma feels the plane level out and then May’s voice is on comms telling them they’re free to move. Fitz unfastens his belt and heads for his bunk with a quick nod in her direction. Not unfriendly, exactly. Not quite right, either.

By the time Jemma lays down in her bunk, it takes her an hour to fall asleep; she isn’t used to the rumble of the Bus anymore. She lays on her back and listens to the engines, watches the clouds pass by underneath them. When she sleeps, it’s fitfully, and she dreams of the wind harsh and biting against her face.

++

The 0-8-4 extraction isn’t complicated. There’s a cave, and a cube, and the five of them are in and out in less than an hour. She and Fitz use the dwarves to assess the structural integrity of the caves, do early readings on the physical properties of the cube. May and Skye stand guard outside, their thick boots wearing down the grass while they patrol. 

Outside it doesn’t look anything like Puerto Rico, but inside, it feels the same. 

++

May has them wheels up by the time Jemma and Fitz unpack the cube to run initial tests in the garage. They only brought half the Bus’ usual equipment; analysis is limited, but Coulson’s standing with his hands on his hips like he expects answers, so Jemma does her best to oblige.

It doesn’t feel the same. The five of them on the Bus, the four of them in the garage. Fitz was right. They give each other more room than she remembers, their hands and feet making wide arcs around the benches, around each other. Even Coulson and Skye watch them with too much disinterest to be natural. Jemma keeps her eyes on the dwarves’ readings and doesn’t think—tries not to think—about the extra space between her hands and Fitz’s.

They’re only a half hour into analysis when Jemma feels the air in the plane go still. The metal of the cube shines suddenly, gone pearly and shining in front of them. Sneezy shrieks to life just as Bashful starts chirping, high, ringing alarms while the data on Jemma’s tablet goes crazy. The lights on the cube start to pulse, faster and faster until they’re a solid glow, and a steady hum ricochets off the walls of the garage. 

“What’s happening?” May’s voice over comms isn’t panicked, not quite, but Coulson’s eyes are wide and Skye’s knuckles are white on the table. 

Jemma looks at Fitz, at the round O of his mouth, as he gestures toward the readings from the energy signatures. “We have to disable it,” he’s saying, and Jemma’s hands are reaching and reaching and then the ground comes up to meet her and the world goes black.

++

Jemma has one hand fisted into her pillow and the other draped over her eyes, and she’s biting her bottom lip to keep her voice from spilling out. There’s a buzz just at the ends of her fingers, pinpricks at the tips of her toes. Her back arches off the bed all on its own, the tide of want low in her belly twisting in on itself, getting stronger, waves cresting and breaking and a thousand other ways to say _amazing_. She lifts her head off the pillow and looks down her body.

“What time is the team due back?” Her voice is half strangled, half whispered, pushing out past the low moan in her throat. 

She feels Fitz’s smirk between her legs, the quirk of his lips as he presses a kiss against her thigh. “Really?” 

Jemma’s eyes roll back in her head, partly in exasperation, partly at the way Fitz’s tongue is curling around her clit, slow steady circles that make her dig her heels into the mattress. “What time?” She’d be embarrassed at the timbre of her voice, heady and desperate and too loud, but they’re past that now, well past it, so instead she reaches down and tugs at the ends of Fitz’s too long curls and asks again, “When?”

Fitz presses a hand flat against Jemma’s belly, rests his chin against his wrist and sighs. “Not for hours,” he says. His thumb rubs circles against her skin. “I’m a little concerned this isn’t holding your attention, Jem.” 

This time the look she gives him is all exasperation, with a twinge of frustration at the way his thumb’s dipping lower. She props herself up on one elbow. “I just want to make sure we don’t get caught again. You’re not the one who got reprimanded by May last time.”

Fitz laughs against her belly. Jemma slides her hand down from the crown of his head to rest against his face, her thumb tracing his cheekbone and the ridge of his nose. The hot pool of want beneath his hands gets softer, lighter, flares up and settles deep in her chest. She’s so in love with him, she aches.

Fitz nips at the tip of her thumb. “So you’re saying faster?”

Jemma pulls her hand away and lays back, cants her hips and sighs. “I’m not saying faster, just—”

But Fitz is well ahead of her, the flat of his tongue pressed against the warmest parts of her, the slick and shaking spot he knows she wants him. He’s got a hand on her breast and his mouth is hot against her, all terrible, wonderful pressure. The ache in her chest presses up against the heat in her belly and she’s one, two, three flicks of his tongue away from coming apart entirely. One of her hands holds tight to the bedframe and the other covers her mouth and she digs her teeth into the meat of her thumb and melts into the white noise of relief.

She still has spots behind her eyes when he kisses his way from her hip to her shoulder, hooks a hand around her knee and slides inside, a slow roll of his hips as she winds one arm around his neck. He wipes his palm over his mouth, leans his weight against his elbow and presses his lips to her temple. The white noise under her skin sparks up again as he moves in and out of her and she breathes out a moan against his neck. She thinks if she could, she’d stay right here forever.

“Let’s stay right here forever,” she says, her voice hitching up when he hits that certain spot inside her. 

He laughs low in his throat and kisses her. He tastes like _her_ , like _them_ , and Jemma drags her teeth along his bottom lip and pulls him closer. They don’t usually get to take their time, kept to frenzied hands in hidden corners, eager mouths in darkened stairwells. She presses her bare chest against his and breathes, matches her heartbeat to his like it will keep them here forever, tucked into each other in this temporary place they’ve made their own. 

“God,” Fitz says, his fingers digging into the skin of her hip. “You’re just—” But whatever she is he must not have words for; he kisses her instead, his mouth rough against hers. He pulls at her waist, uses his weight to flip them over, and then she’s got a knee braced on either side of him and her palms are warm against his chest. 

She loves him like this, one hand at her hip, the other coming up to cover hers against his skin. She loves him in the kitchen too, and in the lab, and in the garage, but right here he’s only hers and she can pretend that it’s forever. She rocks against him and she loves him, leans down to kiss him and she loves him. She rocks and rocks and loves him and loves him, and her eyes squeeze tight and—

++

Jemma comes to with one armed curled under her chest and a heat like fire in her veins. The plane’s alarms sound out around the garage, insistent and meaningless in her ears, and she can’t catch her breath. In the time it takes to roll onto her back—gingerly, carefully, as shocks of pain shoot from her wrist to her shoulder—she hears Coulson yelling into the comms.

“Get us stabilized,” he’s saying, and the plane lurches and rolls and rights itself, the motion pulling at the pain in the back of Jemma’s mind. She stares at the ceiling and tries to tame her breaths, short in, long out, while she cradles her arm to her chest. Her fingers prod tentatively along the bone—bruised but not broken, she decides—and then she takes a deep breath and sits up.

The cabinets in the garage are made to stay fastened, made to withstand turbulence and the shocks and shivers of mid-air flight; except for one that hadn’t been closed, judging by the first aid equipment scattered everywhere, everything is where it should be. Except for them. Coulson’s still talking to May through the comms, one hand braced against the wall and the other pressed to his ribs; Fitz is on the ground with his elbows on his knees, chest heaving while he stares at the floor; and Skye—Skye has a blood-covered hand in front of her, staring at it like it’s someone else’s. Streaks of red trail down the side of her face, from her temple to her chin and onto the front of her shirt. Jemma pushes herself to her feet, ignores the pain in her arm and grabs a pack of bandages from the floor.

“Skye?” She squats down and uses her good arm to move Skye’s dripping hand away from her face. “Skye, can you hear me?”

It only takes a second for Skye to come back to herself, for her eyes to focus on Jemma’s and her breathing to pick up. “What—” Skye’s eyes dart around the room and back to Jemma. She tries to touch her fingers to her temple but Jemma pulls her hand away, squeezing down on Skye’s bloody palm.

“You can’t,” she says. Jemma’s voice isn’t half as calm as it’s supposed to be. Skye’s breath keeps getting faster and faster. Jemma’s eyes meet Coulson’s over her shoulder, and he nods—briefly, terribly—and looks away.

“Fitz,” Jemma says, eyes still on Skye, “I need 10 milligrams of diazepam.” The box of bandages at Jemma’s knee starts to rattle, the instruments on the floor shivering against each other. Under the bench, she can see the cube, silent and dark and shaking, and her voice is an anguished sound when she says, “Fitz, now!”

Skye’s eyes are wide and her breath is frantic and Jemma’s chest is contracting in on itself, a steady squeeze of pressure in her ribcage. “Skye, you have to breathe,” she’s saying, but Jemma hasn’t had any answers for the past month and she doesn’t have any now, and the tears that spring up in her eyes are as much in anger as pain.

The second after Jemma opens her mouth to yell for Fitz again, he’s at her side, shoulder knocking into hers. She shuts her eyes against the wave of pain that shoots down toward her elbow and reaches blindly for the syringe in his hand. “Get her sleeve rolled up,” she’s saying, and Fitz’s fingers push and pull at the fabric of Skye’s shirt until he’s exposed the soft skin of her forearm.

The cabinets behind him shiver on their hinges. “Jemma, do it!” She clenches her jaw and lunges at Skye, the needle finding a vein as Skye sucks in another breath.

It takes twenty seconds—or twenty minutes or twenty years—for Skye’s breathing to slow, for her eyes to go soft and unfocused, for the room to shake itself out and go still. Jemma sits back on her heels, presses a hand to her chest, and wills herself not to cry.

May has the plane set to autopilot by the time Fitz and Coulson get Skye safely into her old bunk. Jemma double checks Skye’s vitals while Fitz locks the cube away in the interrogation room. Its walls are lead-lined and reinforced, meant to keep in all manner of terrible things; Jemma doesn’t know what powers the cube has, doesn’t know what came over her when it flared into life, but her hands haven’t stopped shaking even though Skye’s out cold.

Jemma slides the door to Skye’s bunk closed and takes a breath to calm herself. Coulson, May and Fitz are sat around the cabin table, lips pulled into hard lines. Jemma takes the seat next to Fitz—Fitz’s hands, Fitz’s mouth, it all bubbles up in her mind. She cradles her arm in her lap and looks at Coulson.

“Skye’s sedated?” Coulson shifts uncomfortably in his seat; judging by his grimace at carrying Skye from the garage and the way he’s balancing his weight to one side, Jemma’s pretty sure he’s looking at some damage to his ribs. She nods.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Fitz staring resolutely at the tabletop. “What was that,” he asks.

“Skye or the cube?” Coulson asks.

“I saw—” For the first time, Jemma looks at May, really looks at her. She’s half-slumped in her seat and her face is pale and slack. She looks—she looks hollow. Dazed in a way that Jemma’s never seen her, not even after Skye was shot, not even after Ward. May’s hands tighten into fists on the table and she says, “I saw something. I guess the cube went off and I passed out in the cockpit and. I saw something.”

Fitz’s hand, Fitz’s mouth. Jemma squeezes her eyes shut and nods again, her neck stiff and jerky. Pain radiates from her wrist up to her elbow and her nails dig into the meat of her palm.

It’s Coulson who speaks. “I saw us on a mission.” He looks at May. “You, me and Skye, at a factory in Miami. Ward was there.”

Whatever color had been in May’s face drains away. “He killed me.” 

Coulson nods. There’s a strange tightness in Jemma’s chest because she doesn’t understand, and she always understands. It takes Jemma a moment, a gaping, wide-eyed moment, to realize what they’re saying, the impossible thing they’re implying. That the thing they saw was the same, was identical, that the thing they saw was shared. 

When she snaps back into herself, Coulson’s looking at her with steady eyes. There’s a reason he’s the director, she knows; the unflappable set of his jaw seems impossible to Jemma. “What did you see?” he asks.

Jemma stares at the table—Fitz’s skin and dappled sunlight—and wills her face to stay even—cotton sheets and lazy fingers, her beating heart and shaking breath, his smile against her lips and— 

“Not a mission,” she says. Her voice is threaded with something she can’t get her head around, nerves and emotion and echoing lust. “It was—”

Out of corner of her eyes, she sees Fitz’s hands flex against the wood grain, the pads of his fingers pressing down. It kills the words in her throat. For all they’ve been out of sync these past weeks, these past months, she knows they’re in the same place now, heads filled with streaming sunlight and slick skin. She doesn’t want to, can’t look at him, but she does. 

She’s known Fitz for a decade, for over a third of their lives, and when his eyes find hers, Jemma doesn’t recognize him. She’s never seen this look before, this mix of stark panic and want. It comes back to her like a wave—more than the thought of his hands, of his mouth, it’s the _feeling_ of the two of them together cracking open inside her chest—visceral and immediate and real. 

Fitz blinks and ducks his head and the split in Jemma’s chest breaks apart. “It was personal,” Fitz says. He sounds nothing like himself.

Coulson looks back and forth between them. He must know when to pick his battles and when to fight another day, because he slides out of his seat and says, “May, with me. Fitz and Simmons, I want you in the lab figuring out what happened.” He nods at Jemma. “Check on Skye and then I want an explanation by the time this plane lands.”

While May and Coulson head toward the cockpit, Jemma sets her wrist gingerly on the table. The breath she takes rattles around in her chest for an eternity. 

Streaks of light filter in through the windows and over the both of them. Jemma doesn’t trust her voice but she asks, “Did you see—”

“I—” Fitz clears his throat. Jemma isn’t quite looking at him, but she can see the sunset curling around the line of his jaw. “Yes.”

Jemma swallows and dips her chin. Her voice catches in her throat when she says, “I’m going to sit with Skye until she wakes up.” Fitz’s eyes stay fixed well away from her. “I’ll be down in the lab when she’s settled.” 

Jemma watches Fitz’s back as he heads to the lab and doesn’t think about the two of them together. She bandages her wrist with shaking fingers and doesn’t think about the emptiness in May’s voice, the silent dread. She stares at the research notes on her tablet and doesn’t read a single word of them.

It’s an hour before Skye blinks herself awake. Jemma’s hands are reassuring and warm on her arm. Jemma doesn’t want to ask what she saw but she asks anyway. Skye tells her in watery whispers: the mission, and Ward’s gun, and May cold and still beneath them. 

Jemma nods. She leaves her hand where it is on Skye’s wrist and watches the clouds outside the window and wants to—but doesn’t—cry.

++

They don’t have an answer for Coulson the day they land, or the day after. It takes them almost three hours to figure out how to open the damn thing. There’s a complex knot of gears inside, twisted in on themselves like rope. Jemma takes samples for elemental analysis while Fitz and Mack try to figure out how to stabilize it.

“Magnets?” Fitz suggests.

Mack shrugs. “And prayer, probably.”

Jemma keeps her distance—from the cube, from Fitz, from the images spinning circles in her mind. She reorganizes every thought in her head twice over until there’s nothing but the cube on the table in front of them.

Mack runs scanners over the different pieces they’ve disassembled, he and Fitz positing theories between them. Jemma reviews readings from her tablet, collates data and tries to think. 

“These plates seem to be for shielding,” Fitz says, “redirecting the energy from the core.” 

“But there were no injuries and there don’t seem to be any lasting effects,” Jemma says. “So we don’t even know what the point of it is.”

Mack crosses his arms. “What do you mean?” 

Jemma gestures to the pieces spread out in front of them, silent and lifeless on the bench. “What’s the point in a weapon like this?”

Fitz cocks up one shoulder. “We don’t know that it’s a weapon.”

 _Right._ Jemma nods. She wonders when she stopped seeing the possibilities in the extraordinary things they found, when it all became a threat instead. She turns her chair away and goes back to organizing data.

It takes Jemma the space of an afternoon to realize she isn’t needed. They haven’t found any biological components yet, nothing for her to swab or inspect. The elemental analysis will take an hour to process, so she cedes control of the lab and goes to find Skye instead. She brings everything she needs for a blood draw and heads through the halls to Skye’s room.

When she knocks, Skye doesn’t answer right away. It isn’t until Jemma’s called out twice that she hears a voice from inside, and when she pushes open the door, she sees Skye on her bunk with her back toward the door.

The flutter of fear in Jemma’s chest feels like a betrayal, so she squares her shoulders and steps inside. However much Skye’s changed since joining the team, she’s not any tidier than she was when she first came on board; Jemma picks her way through black t-shirts and dark jeans until she’s at the foot of the bed. “Skye, do you have a minute?” Skye doesn’t answer. “I wanted to take your blood sample for today and see how you’re doing.”

The muscles of Skye’s back tense and pull together. Jemma wants to apologize for sedating her on the plane yesterday but she’s not sure how, so she says nothing instead. When Skye finally turns to face her, it’s with teary eyes. It freezes something in Jemma’s chest, the ugly twist to her friend’s mouth, the ragged breath Skye takes as she settles herself on the bed. Jemma does her best to keep track of Skye’s high and lows, a pendulum swinging wild between softness and steel, but she’s never quite sure what to prepare for. Better this than the shaking, unstable Skye on the plane last night, which Jemma hates herself for thinking even more than the fear she’d felt before. 

Jemma takes a breath and uncaps the needle while Skye rolls up her sleeve. “Semi-human pincushion reporting for duty,” she says. The smile on her lips is a shadow.

It’s not until Jemma’s capping the tube of Skye’s blood that Skye speaks again. “It felt real,” she says. She tugs at the end of her sleeve, pulls it to her wrist and then farther, all the way down to her fingertips. “I think that’s why I lost control.” She won’t look at Jemma. “Ward and Raina were there, and Coulson and May and I, and everything was fine, I mean.” Skye tucks her hand behind her ear. “Not fine. Bullets and the usual craziness, you know? And then things turned, just like that. And then May was on the ground and Ward and Raina rabbited.” 

Jemma doesn’t think that Skye can see her but she nods anyway. They haven’t talked like this since Puerto Rico. Jemma doesn’t have to look to see Skye’s eyes filling with tears again; she can hear them in the thickness of Skye’s voice, the catch just there in her throat. “I had her blood on my hands,” Skye says. “Coulson and I, we tried to save her, you know, we did what we could and we called for back-up, but. She was there and then she just. Wasn’t. When I came back to the plane, I thought her blood would still be all over me.”

As much as she and Fitz are drudging through miles of weirdness, what they saw seems so trivial next to this. Jemma reaches a hand toward Skye, lets just the tips of her fingers press up against Skye’s wrist. Skye bounces her knees up and down, shakes her head and clears her throat to pull herself back together.

“We’ll figure out what it was,” Jemma says. “There’s got to be an explanation for what we all saw.”

Skye tucks her hair behind her ear and gives Jemma a look, appraising and suspicious. Her voice is careful when she asks, “What’d you see?” 

Even more than Jemma doesn’t want to answer, she can’t lie to Skye, not when she just opened up the rawest parts of herself for Jemma to see. She shifts on the edge of the bed, her knee almost pressed to Skye’s. “I was with Fitz,” she says. Even to her own ears, her voice sounds small. 

“With him doing what?”

Jemma looks at Skye meaningfully, shrugs one shoulder, raises one eyebrow. There was a time this came easily to them, not so long ago, carefree laughter and ready jokes. It’s not easy anymore, and Jemma flexes it like an unused muscle. “ _With_.”

To her credit, Skye keeps her expression almost even. “Like, _with with_.” Jemma nods. “Wow. Okay. So. That’s new.”

Jemma should log Skye’s sample into the lab, she knows, but instead she picks at the bandage on her wrist and stays where she is. She closes her eyes and remembers. “It wasn’t just that it was sex,” she says, proud of how even her voice sounds, “it was more than that.” 

“I really don’t need anatomical details,” Skye says. 

Jemma huffs out a sort of laugh. “Not like that.” She closes her eyes. Fitz’s hands, Fitz’s mouth. The way she clung to him, the way she wanted him, warm and familiar and aching. “It was—” Jemma tries to stop the thought in her head but she can’t: _love, love, love, love, love._

“It was real,” Skye says. 

Jemma nods. “Yeah.”

Skye takes a deep breath and shakes her hair away from her face. “I shouldn’t have lost control on the plane,” she says. Jemma starts to interrupt, but Skye keeps going. “I could have hurt you guys. We don’t know what this is, or why it happened, or what it means. The rest of the world is bad enough. I shouldn’t be something else you guys have to be protected from.” Skye’s eyes are watery and she smiles around the catch Jemma can hear in her throat. “I can’t stand the thought of hurting you guys.”

Jemma fixes her eyes on the toes of her shoes. In the lab, Fitz and Mack are probably running a new set of tests on the cube, powering up instruments and still figuring out possible causes for the things they saw. The knot in Jemma’s chest twists around itself. “We hurt each other without meaning to all the time. At least you’re trying.”

“Not hard enough.” 

Jemma wishes she could will them both answers: for what happened in Puerto Rico, for what happened on the plane, for all of it. “You’ll get there,” she says. “ _We’ll_ get there.”

Skye nods, small and disbelieving. Jemma can see her old friend still there at the edges, at the corner of Skye’s mouth when she flips her hair over her shoulder and says, “I’d just like to know what the fuck is going on.”

++

It takes one more night before they figure out _exactly_ what the fuck. Jemma’s in vault G, a card table full of files in front of her, feeling the beginnings of a sneeze from all the dust she’s unsettled. When she finally finds the file she’s looking for, it’s sandwiched between a field report on the demolition of a Hydra base—Jemma sighs out a jaded laugh and shakes her head—and a list of known gifteds from 1949.

The photos inside are black and white and grainy. The 0-8-4 is different in dimensions and configuration, but Jemma recognizes the sleek lines of machinery and distinctive gearwork right away. The notes are faded, small print in a steady hand: the original 0-8-4 was recovered in November 1953, found during commercial development in central Spain, and recovered by SHIELD immediately. There’s a case file with details on the recovery, the extraction, and the controlled triggering of the device.

Jemma sits forward, back scraping against the folding chair she brought down with her. Her eyes scan over detailed descriptions of the SHIELD team members experiencing shared visions, recalling in exact detail the same experiences. Four on a mission, two doing lab work, one grocery shopping. And a follow-up report, dated June 1954, seven months after the initial activation:

“Update: agents reported experiencing the identical scenarios from triggering of cube device. Events believed to be reflective, not causative. Incident suggests initial visions related to non-linear experience of personal timelines. Object not recommended for research or development, as functionality and applications of device are too variable for field use. Recommended classification: level eight.”

Jemma reads it and reads it again, flips through the folder front to back. She stops at the last photo in the file, her heart beating out of her chest. It’s the interior of the device, inner plates stripped away, and just at the corner is the same etching as the cube in their lab. 

_Non-linear experience of personal timelines._ For the past three days, it’s come to her in waves, bits and pieces she’s tried to push away. A lazy beam of sunlight falling over the foot of her bed. The rough cotton of her sheets against the skin of her back. The feel of Fitz’s thumb at her hipbone, his lips at her temple. And more, so much more than that. His laugh, his smile. How sure he’d been of her, of _them_ , how happy she’d felt, how whole.

Jemma grabs the folder and knocks back her chair, doesn’t bother putting the boxes away or locking the door behind her. It takes her two minutes to walk from vault G to the lab, enough time for her heart rate to climb to a pounding in her chest. Not enough time to talk herself out of it.

Fitz, Mack, and two techs are looking at a diagram on the holocom when she walks in, the file clutched defensively to her chest. “I need the lab,” she says. 

Fitz turns toward her first, then Mack, then the techs. Mack gestures toward the diagram, but Jemma talks over him. “I need the lab.” Her face feels like marble. Jemma’s not sure if they defer to her out of respect, or fear, or their own sense of personal safety, but Mack nods and the techs scatter. Fitz takes a step away from the com when Jemma says, “Stay.”

Fitz freezes. “What?”

“I need you to stay.”

The look he gives Mack brings frustrated tears to Jemma’s eyes. She bounces up and down on her toes and hugs the file tighter to her chest and tries to breathe, tries not to think about sunlight or sheets or the hours they’ve spent side by side in labs just like this one. _Non-linear experience of personal timelines._ She blinks her eyes dry and looks at Fitz. “Please stay.”

Fitz nods once at Mack and turns back to the holocom, minimizes the diagram and braces his hands on the table. “Did you find something?”

It takes Jemma five steps to walk to the holocom, two heartbeats to set down the file. She leaves it closed, runs her hands over the curling edges, the faded lines. She clears her throat and her head, forces her voice to stay steady when she says, “There was another 0-8-4. In the 50s. Like the one we found.” Fitz reaches for the file but Jemma pulls it back, keeps her hands pressed firmly over the folder. She stares at the tips of her fingers. “The team that was in the area when it was triggered experienced shared visions, just like we did.” There are streaks of dust on the backs of her knuckles. “And then six months later, they all experienced the events of those visions as part of their daily life.” Jemma opens the folder and slides the photo toward him, the one of the etching on the inside of the cube. She licks her lips and takes a breath that lasts a lifetime and then raises her eyes to his. “It was their future. That’s what they saw.”

Of all the impossible things Jemma has seen in her time at SHIELD, nothing has sat in her stomach quite like this. She has a thousand questions and all of them die in her throat at the look on Fitz’s face, his hands braced against the com, shoulders hunched up, and a light in his eyes like a fire. She wants to reach for him. She wants to run away. She wants to go back a year, a decade, wrap her arms around him that first day at the academy and warn him about all the things out there that will hurt him. Including her. Especially her. Instead she takes a breath and slides the rest of the file toward him and doesn’t look away.

It takes Fitz seven deep breaths—Jemma knows because she counts them, each one—until he reaches an unsteady hand toward the file and starts to read. Jemma doesn’t say anything until he’s finished, until he’s read it twice through and gone still again.

His hands flex against the table. His voice is a knife. “SHIELD hasn’t been able to authenticate any instances of time disturbance.”

“That we knew of.” Jemma’s teeth scrape at the inside of her cheek. “In the 50s, level eight would’ve been director level. It wasn’t even scanned into the digital archive, they obviously wanted to bury it.” 

Fitz nods his head, just barely, his mouth a thin line. He slides a paper toward her, the update from seven months later. His eyes are fixed on the file. “Non-linear experience of personal timelines?” 

There’s nothing to say, so Jemma says nothing. She’s spent the past three days wondering at the things they saw, puzzling at the weight of them in her chest. It all felt _so real_ , and the folder that’s inches from Jemma’s hand is finally telling them why, and Jemma can’t stand it. She pushes away from the table, turns her back to Fitz and braces her hands against her back. “We need to tell Coulson,” she says. “He’s been waiting for answers.”

Fitz’s voice is doubtful. “These aren’t answers, these are a million more questions. He’s not going to believe this, and May won’t either.”

Jemma feels her heart stop in her chest. She turns to Fitz, eyes wide. “May.”

++

For the fifteen minutes it takes them to run to Coulson’s office and tell him everything they know, Jemma doesn’t think about anything but May’s voice, hollow and panicked: _he killed me, he killed me, he killed me_. Coulson is stone-faced while they explain the file, his jaw set when he tells them to find something in the cube to corroborate the original 0-8-4 report. 

It’s easier to figure out the cube once they know what they’re looking for. Fitz uses the more obscure instruments in the lab, customizing the settings to search for wave patterns and energy signatures. Jemma collates data, charts and graphs the findings, runs calculation after calculation until they’re sure. 

“It’s dark energy,” Fitz says when they’re finally ready to brief Coulson. They’ve been running analysis for six hours. The collar of Fitz’s shirt is stretched out, his voice rough, his hands steady. “We didn’t see it before because … it shouldn’t exist.” He takes a step toward the holocom. Jemma pulls up the reading he needs without being told. “These scalar fields are showing asymmetrical inputs and outputs, because the energy isn’t moving linearly, it’s moving in closed curves. Which is impossible.” 

“We were looking for biological components that could’ve induced shared hallucinations or dream states, but we didn’t find any because it wasn’t biological.” Jemma pulls up another chart, even though Coulson won’t understand it. Jemma barely understands it. “This is all based on theoretical concepts of physical time, but we aren’t physicists.” She looks quickly to Fitz, the same apologetic expression on his face that she knows is on hers. “There isn’t a lot we can tell you. 

Coulson crosses his arms over his chest. “I need more than this.”

“We don’t have more than this,” Jemma says.

Fitz gestures toward the display. “I can talk to you about the cosmological constant and quin—quin—” He takes a breath and clenches his hands and looks at Jemma.

“Quintessence.”

“Quintessence and equations of state until I’m blue in the face, but I am never going to be able to explain it to you.” He shakes his head. “And we’re never going to show you anything on these charts that will stop it happening.” 

Jemma remembers sometimes the look on Coulson’s face after Skye was shot, the white cheeks and wide eyes telling her to _fix it_. She’s never been so foolish as to ask for specifics on his past with May, but she’s never been so naive as to assume they don’t exist, that there aren’t decades worth of memories on his mind when Coulson clenches his jaw and looks at them. “You two are sure?” Because he’s Coulson, his voice doesn’t shake, but she can hear the tension in his throat, can see the worry in his eyes when he stares her down.

There are vials of poisoned blood at Jemma’s station across the lab and the bruises running up her wrist are not yet healed. There are a thousand questions she’s been asked to answer and monsters without and within. She doesn’t recognize her own voice when she says, “Yes, sir. We’re sure.”

Coulson takes a deep breath and drops his arms to his sides. He looks so old. “If you two can’t stop it scientifically, we’ll have to figure something else out.” He gestures to the original 0-8-4 file. “Scan this and distribute it to the team along with your analysis. I’ll find May and Skye to go over everything we know.” 

Coulson pauses, shifting back and forth on his feet. “I don’t think I have to tell you two that stopping this from happening is our only priority right now.” Jemma can see the unflappable veneer slipping back over his face; she can see the cracks in it too. She would offer him reassurance if there were any to be found, but her throat and hands are empty and now isn’t the time. Her eyes follow him out of the lab and down the hall.

Jemma files away their findings while Fitz cleans up the bench, and the silence in the lab is so heavy she thinks it will sink them. She hears the slowness in Fitz’s hands as he straightens and re-straightens the instruments. “So,” he says. His voice is a knife. “We stop it happening.” It isn’t quite a question, except for the thousand ways it is.

Jemma can still feel the steady weight of him above her, has spent four sleepless nights with a head full of half-remembered sunlight and half-imagined sighs. She can feel it slipping through her fingertips and she’s not sure whether to grab hold or let go, whether to lean in or pull away. She feels her arms tighten around him six month ago and knows what those arms will feel like six months from now, and the space between their past and the someday future they saw feels impossible.

“Yes,” she says. May’s voice and Fitz’s mouth, blood on Skye’s hands and the things inside all of them Jemma’s learned to be afraid of. Her mouth tastes like saltwater. “We stop it.”

++++


End file.
